Gah, it’s been ages! My apologies, but I have excuses and notes from doctors… or something…

In all honesty, I’ve been damned busy with Hidden work – preparing for a release pre-IGF has sucked up all my time for the past few weeks. However, there is an end in sight at last – we’ve got the majority of the features we wanted in and working (to various different degrees) and about a week of tweaking, testing and fixing before we ideally want to release.

In uni news, I’m coming up to the end of my fifth unit – which has been planning for my research project for the summer. The title of which is “Swarm intelligence for modern military RTS games” – so I get to faff about with swarms / flocking techniques and make use of military tactics (formation movement, taking cover when under fire, plotting concealed routes etc).

I’ve got to finish off the beginnings of my lit review over the weekend, which requires about 4 or 5 pages of writing and a fair bit of reading, but it shouldn’t take too long if I get a bit of focused time on it. With that handed in on Monday, I also start the limited resource hardware unit which means I get to play with ps2 linux kits – sounds like the assignment will be to use perlin noise and generate terrain with it.

I picked up Black last week – but it’s late so I’ll talk about my views on it later in the weekend (it’s basically going to be a glowing review).

It’s taken much wrangling of hands and the odd debt but 5 of us are off two GDC in March (well, we will be once I’ve booked the tickets tomorrow – a simple yet important step!) We’ll be showing off the Hidden at the IGF pavillion as part of the Mod competition finals.

Myself, Keith, Rick, Gus and Ben will be running off on the 20th of March to spend 4 days in San Jose, California. Spending 2 – 3 hours a day running demonstrations of the mod and generally networking, perhaps sneaking off for the odd hour to catch the occasional presentation.

It’s going to be fairly intense I suspect, we’ll have about 12 hours from landing to get ourselves sorted out, get some kip in and make ourselves presentable – a tough job for 5 people sharing one hotel room! (2 double beds, we’re going to have to rota the floor!)

We’ll be taking a stack of business cards along with us, just so we can palm them off to anyone and everyone we meet – it’d be especially awesome if some of the valve guys turned up to say hi! (Though I fear that Keith will tear into them for the shocking art pipeline they’ve made for Source.)

It should be cool – it’s a bit scary, but cool all at the same time, even if we don’t win, we’ll have hopefully made some important contacts!

Side note : I’ve leapt upon the podcast wagon – woot! Grab it here. It’s obviously a newb effort, but it might improve with time, you never know!